News tagged with nitrogen oxides

Rising from trees into the atmosphere, isoprene—a colorless, volatile, carbon-containing compound—smells vaguely like tires. It helped give the Blue Ridge Mountain range its name and has a profound effect upon the chemistry ...

Cornell researchers have discovered a biological mechanism that helps convert nitrogen-based fertilizer into nitrous oxide, an ozone-depleting greenhouse gas. The paper was published online Nov. 17 in the Proceedings of the ...

Nitrogen oxide

The term nitrogen oxide typically refers to any binary compound of oxygen and nitrogen, or to a mixture of such compounds:

(Note that the last three are unstable.)

Chemical reactions that produce nitrogen oxides often produce several different compounds, the proportions of which depend on the specific reaction and conditions. For this reason, secondary[clarification needed] production of N2O is undesirable, as NO and NO2 — which are extremely toxic — are liable to be produced as well.